He drew a pistol and pointed it. From the purple highlights it was indeed Vierziger’s weapon.
“—warm!”
“I’ll wait for you in—”
Pepe shot her in the face. The Widow turned. Luria continued shooting as the body spun onto the rubble and bounced. The Widow’s hand was outstretched toward Peres, but their dead fingers did not touch.
The last of the fireflies rose from the hands of the attendant servicing it. The six deadly constructs wove a violet corona above the L’Escorial leadership.
“Now,” the intelligence officer said. “But don’t harm the fireflies, they’re mine. Four out.”
Pepe Luria noticed that his constellation of fireflies moved without his ordering them to do so. He reacted instantly, diving to cover under one of the armored cars flanking him.
“Take them!” said Major Matthew Coke, and the darkness ignited.
Vierziger fired his 2-cm weapon into the side of the vehicle. Even at a range of nearly 500 meters, the powerful charge turned a chunk of steel armor into vapor and white flame rupturing outward.
Molten and gaseous metal sprayed Pepe beneath the opposite car. Luria jumped up screaming, his hair and clothing afire. Vierziger’s second bolt blew his head off in a cyan flash.
Sten Moden launched a missile. The roof of L’Escorial headquarters reflected some of the backblast straight up, so the building itself appeared to have exploded in red flames.
Before the launcher operator fired, he locked a missile on by snapping an image with his guidance laser, then designated it as a point or object target. In the latter case—a maneuvering armored vehicle, for example—the missile guided itself to the target without updates from the operator.
The missiles had a ten-kilometer range, or even farther if they were launched from a level higher than the chosen target. Here, at half a klick, unburned rocket fuel added to the already cataclysmic effect of the powerful warhead.
An armored car disintegrated in a flash so bright that it seemed to shine through the steel. A red-orange mushroom mounted a hundred meters in the air, raining debris. The blast stove in the side of the car nearest the target vehicle and set it afire. The spray of fragments killed scores of L’Escorial gunmen, shredding some of them from knee height upward.
Matthew Coke chose targets—anybody moving on the street this night—and spun them down with short bursts. Margulies fired her 2-cm weapon from a door alcove five meters ahead of Coke, and Vierziger’s weapons slapped with mechanical precision from the alley west of L’Escorial headquarters.
On targets so distant, a sub-machine gun’s 1-cm bolts were near the low end of their effectiveness. Coke preferred an automatic weapon to the wallop of a 2-cm powergun, particularly at the short ranges he expected before this night was over. He could have carried weapons of both styles, as Vierziger did, but when he got tired he might have grabbed the wrong ammo for the gun he was trying to reload. Even the most experienced veteran could screw up that way….
Part of Coke’s mind wondered if Johann Vierziger ever screwed up. Not when it involved killing something, he supposed.
The second missile hit. The launcher was intended for vehicular use. The thrust of exhaust against the sides of a launching tube pushed even a man as big and strong as Sten Moden a pace backward, so it took a moment to recenter the sights between rounds.
This time the target was the vehicle which carried bombardment rockets. The launching rack was empty, but Moden guessed there might be reloads within the armored hull. He must have been right, because the secondary explosion shattered the concrete facade protecting the building across the street and swept away all the external staircases.
The carnage among L’Escorials still stunned by the first blast was immense. The gunmen literally didn’t know what had hit them.
Coke changed magazines, then slung the first sub-machine gun to cool while he fired the backup weapon. Anything moving was a target. They weren’t human, they weren’t even alive; they were merely motions in his holographic gunsights. He supposed a few of his bursts missed, but he was carrying over 2,000 rounds of ammunition….
“Three, cover my advance!” he ordered. He sprinted past Margulies to the alcove that had served a ground-floor brothel at the west end of the building. The strapped and plated door was firmly closed.
Gunmen—L’Escorials now, like the Astras before them—would be seeking shelter in the buildings. There was none. Those inside would not open their doors to the violence beyond, and the lawlessness of Potosi in past days meant the locked portals would withstand the efforts of panicked thugs to break in.
There was only the forest; and, for those who stayed in Potosi, death.
Two figures—a pudgy man and the aged one clinging to his arm—staggered toward the armored cars straddling the hole in the wall before the Astra compound. A tribarrel on one vehicle raked the night, but its bolts slashed at mid-height across the facades across the street.
The gunner didn’t have a target despite the flaring backblast of Moden’s launcher, which Coke thought would have fingered the rocket team across a five-kilometer radius. The fellow was blind with fear, shooting the way a devotee of Krishna might have chanted to bring himself closer to God in a crisis.
Coke aimed at Raul Luria. If he shot Ramon first, the Old Man would fall out of the sight picture as the son who supported him twisted down in death.
Moden’s third rocket hit the armored car as Coke took up the slack on his trigger. The gunner found whatever god he worshipped, and the expanding fireball engulfed the Lurias.
Something tapped Coke’s helmet. He spun, slashing empty air with the butt of his weapon. Shock from the blast had flung bits from the wall above him, nothing more.
The L’Escorial vehicles were all out of action, either hit by missiles or wrecked by the explosion of neighboring vehicles. Fuel fires spread a lurid illumination across the scene in place of the harshness of headlights a few minutes before. The wreckage of Astra headquarters was ablaze also, a pulsing, bloody glow that erupted from among the fallen walls.
Fireflies coursed the alleys, working outward from the killing ground about Astra headquarters. Occasionally the little machines dipped and stabbed the darkness with a single shot. They had been under Barbour’s direction since he broke, then changed, Pepe’s control codes.
A violet spark trundled purposefully down the street at a hundred-meter altitude, then dived to waist height directly in front of Matthew Coke. A hatch in the rear of the hovering device popped open. The firefly had expended its ammunition on L’Escorial gunmen and needed refilling.
Coke thumbed five rounds from a sub-machine gun magazine and fed them into the firefly. The hatch closed and the device curved back into action. Better machines clear the alleys like ferrets in a rabbit warren than that men should have to do so….
The fireflies weren’t armored, and their corona discharges marked them for hostile gunmen. Like tanks, however, the machines had a psychological impact on untrained troops that went far beyond the physical threat they posed. Thugs ran screaming or closed their eyes and sprayed the sky blindly.
The fireflies put their pistol bolts into the center of mass. They dropped each target with the cool precision of hunting wasps stabbing the nerve ganglia of the prey that will feed their larvae.
Coke and Margulies advanced past one another twice more. There were few targets for their guns now.
Moden put a missile into the center of the Astra courtyard, blasting a crater in the scattered rubble, and flushed several figures. One of them sent a short burst of automatic fire in the direction of the launcher’s signature. Coke, Margulies, and Vierziger all spiked the L’Escorial shooter; Niko Daun’s sub-machine gun spattered the vicinity of the target a moment later.
Coke paused just short of an alley mouth. “Cover my—” Margulies began.